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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Cracks don't cause a regular road to fail entirely, while if a solar panel cracks in half, it will most likely stop working.

Also I don't see how solar roads make any sense when there is so much unused roof space and parking lots. Putting panels over a parking lot is much easier since you don't have to build them to withstand many-tonne automobiles, they will always be in full sunlight instead of being covered by dirt and vehicles, and they can be angled towards the sun. Even in theory, I think solar roads are a failure.

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I suspect the idea was partly that we already have to build infrastructure for roads; why not make the roads also a source of power?

In practice it will take many iterations to reach a point where it makes sense. Or it simply may never make sense.

The recent articles about some California farmlands being converted to solar fields does make sense. They were running out of water, but they had a lot of land to use for something.

Even if solar roads can work, there's still the problem of relatively inefficient tranfer of power over long distances. It makes little sense to spend a lot of money to make a solar road that's far away from energy consumers since a lot of the energy produced by the road will be lost in transit.

i stand corrected. But why not use them for bike lanes or parking lots indeed?

So after my erroneous comment, i have learned that roofs, parking lots and bike lanes are better candidates. I just dint want to give up on converting asphalt to energy generators.

Think the person you responded to meant for the solar panels to be above the parking lot, not the parking lot surface. IIRC, Google has quite a far solar panels in their parking lots, where they not only generate electricity but also provide shade for the cars parked there. I've also seen a couple of rather massive solar panels in central Atlanta near CNN. I was told they were installed by Ted Turner because he has a penthouse nearby. No idea how much power they generate but it does provide some nice shade.

There was a different comment recommending parking lots, and i summed up all my thoughts in the comment above. To me it sounds like France could use some shade as well as some clean energy. Calling it quits is just not an option given the crazy heat waves of recent in Europe, and we should hold onto to anything that improves what we have right now even if by 1%.

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